Welcome to the middle of your four-day weekend, you bunch of idle
slackers.

I assume that you did not go to work yesterday and are not
particularly planning on turning in on Monday. After all, according to that august body the CBI, we are nation of skivers and malingerers who
cost the country pounds 13bn a year.

My immediate thought this week when I heard that we had cost our
employers so much money was "let's go for pounds 15bn next
year!" But then I am a very silly boy at times and there is a
serious issue at stake here.

Most of you will probably work with someone who takes lots of
sickies and will be only too aware that it's pretty hard to stop
people making up spurious excuses for not turning in. You might get
suspicious when they say they have Dutch Elm Disease or get "the
flu" when England are in the World Cup, but there's not much
you can say.

And so it is with the CBI.

The pounds 13bn figure comes from extrapolating the answers on a
questionnaire given by 400 employers. But as a nice man from the CBI
explained, the only way to distinguish sickies from genuine absence is
"an educated guess".

"Do you have figures for the amount of money employers save by
people working unpaid overtime?" I asked him, as it seemed to be
the other side of the coin to all this skiving.

"Well, that's not a business issue," he replied.
"It's not something that costing employers."

"But it seems to be a bit unfair to paint us as a nation of
shirkers when lots of people are actually working too hard."

Oh well. The CBI study actually contains lots of good sense, like
pointing out that employers who offer rehabilitation and flexible
working can lose less time to absence.

But it also has a fairly partial and unnecessary dig at trade
unions, uses selective figures to perpetuate the myth that public sector
workers are all constantly on the sick and then says firms should all
get private health insurance. (The study is sponsored by a large
provider of private health insurance, by the way.)

So maybe we're not such a bunch of slackers, after all.
Perhaps those of us who are going into the office today, don't see
enough of their families and work through their lunch hours to cover for
those people who are off sick have been done a bit of a disservice.

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